Most people may agree that there are two types of drivers – the confident and the not so confident. With the help of technological advancement, the automotive industry is leveling these playing fields, making it difficult to categorize drivers. One of my favorite commercials in the past year is the State Farm Safe Driver which depicted a female receiving a “safe driver refund” check. State Farm not only showed off their refund policy for their Safe Driver program, but highlighted that it was a female who got the refund instead of her husband who was helplessly confused possibly because of the oddly popular female driver stereotype.

Technology has always been able to make our lives easier. Safe driving is not excluded from the list of the daily tasks positively affected by technology. Today, the “not so confident” drivers can rely on an array of technologies to not only make us a tad more confident but ultimately safer drivers. So just how is the automobile industry leveling the playing field? We cannot answer that question without taking a high level look at how automobiles have evolved in recent years specifically with a technology in mind.

First there’s the navigation systems. Ten years ago, having a navigation system in your car cost about 10% of the price of your vehicle. Instead, drivers relied on printable directions from sources like MapQuest to get from point A to point B. Reports show that printed maps were a huge distraction for drivers resulting in safety concerns. If you think texting while driving is a major distraction, try reading a map while driving. Today, the majority of new cars have a navigation system—usually a touch screen—that comes standard. Additionally, the navigation has been voice enabled meaning drivers don’t even need to look at the screen for directions.

After a few more technological leaps came self aware cars. It’s mind blowing to know that your car has a sense of self-awareness. Augmented Reality allows cars to visually project directions, dashboard gauges, and more, in front of the driver’s view eradicating the need to look away. The windscreen of cars are now a massive digital screen with endless opportunities. The navigation, the voice commands, even the auto parallel parking really leveled the playing field for various drivers. AR is usually considered to be a live view of the real world, onto which extra data – usually pulled from the internet – is layered or superimposed. In recent years, we’ve seen more automobile brands incorporate AR to their offerings with a promise to make drivers less distracted, thus being able to focus more on what’s on the road ahead. I’ve driven recent models of luxury automobile equipped with AR used to project the dashboard gauges, current speed, maps, directions and other basic dashboard-like information onto the windscreen. The informative data had the amount of opacity not to impair the driver’s view of the what is on the road while at the same time keeping head and eyes straight ahead, nullifying the need to glance away to a navigational or any other screen(s). Once this becomes mainstream, one may argue we will have no need for street signs, since of course pedestrians will be wearing Google glasses with similar AR technology available.

Distractions are said to be the number one cause of accidents in recent years and reducing driver distraction has been one of the major goals of the automobile industry. First we were given Voice Recognition which meant I can tell my car to “take me home” and navigational guidance to my configured home address would be started automatically and now instead of glancing away to a screen I can now see the directions, current speed and a whole lot more right on my dashboard. This is the kind of technology that invigorates us at Shockoe.

We started 2017 with a focus on Voice Recognition, Augmented and Virtual Reality and I must add that it feels great to be a part of a company that has always been on the cutting edge of technology but even better, a company that is always ahead of the curve on the next big idea in this ever changing industry. So when you’re using your enhanced car windows that allow you to to zoom in on places and objects of interest that you are passing, when the back seat of your car appears transparent while reversing so you can see everything around you, just remember, Shockoe will be right there with you, working with those same technologies that are turning us all into confident drivers.

Like many of my colleagues at Shockoe, I began writing computer code in a high school classroom. However, in my case, the school was particularly advanced for its time in offering such a course, and our “computer” was a keyboard, dot-matrix printer, and a modem connection to the University of Virginia, where the actual computer occupied an entire floor of a large building. And while most of those colleagues went on a path that brought them relatively quickly to Shockoe, I spent two decades working as an attorney in New York, Seoul, and Virginia.

Now in my third year of software development I have felt particularly happy to be at Shockoe because I believe it addresses needs that I often saw during my time working as an attorney, needs that I am certain are shared by many industries.

In my experience, the following was typical of the manner in which law firms implement technology. First, the decisions are made by senior partners who, being busy with the representation of clients, have little time to keep up-to-date with what is available or most desirable in technology. This leads either to an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, or an attempt to take care of the problem in one fell swoop with a package solution that may or may not fit comfortably with the way they have set up their practice. In the latter case, the acquired technology may go unused, or used only to the extent required by the firm. For example, if a time-tracking application is difficult to use, an attorney may keep track of his time on post-it notes as she always did before, then have her secretary type it all into the application at the end of the week.

In either case, what then happens is that employees begin finding their own solutions. Each attorney and his or her assistants devise their own system, piecing together hardware and applications as they see fit. Depending on their level of technological sophistication, they may, or may not, arrive at a solution that works well for them. However, this approach drastically reduces the potential for collaboration, and creates a host of potential problems, as the less technologically-adept might adopt solutions that introduce security vulnerabilities or other problems.

Although so often noted as to sound trite, an average employee today with a typical mobile device is comparable to an employee with superpowers two or three decades ago. To make the most of those powers, however, requires sophisticated solutions. This includes, of course, a focus on the possible pitfalls of any new technology. A device that allows employees to watch training videos at convenient times may also allow them to spend the working day watching Netflix. Large collections of data become valuable, and thus must be protected, not only from hackers in foreign locales, but from disgruntled or former employees. Yet while minimizing risk demands much attention, it is just as important to make certain that new technology is used to its full potential. Making one’s workforce five times more efficient is simply not good enough in a competitive business environment if the competition makes their workforce eight times more efficient.

This is what excites me about working at Shockoe, being able to use my skills to allow our clients to make the greatest possible use of the technology available to them. Apps created now increase employee productivity, streamline task performance and ensure employees have real-time data access they need for day to day exchange opposed to the opposite stagnant mentality. If this sounds familiar to you, check out our work for Financial Services Mobile Technology and contact us for any innovative ideas to help your team tackle your digital transformation with a great mobile strategy.